This is a term paper for Indian Buddhism class in the 2nd semester of 2014, taught by Dr. Julia Estève. I love the idea I developed here, because irony in Buddhism can be seen here and there, but it is seldom picked up and talked about. My style of writing at this time was not so good, perhaps because of the tight schedule. In many places, I tended to use copying rather than paraphrasing. However, the essay is a good storehouse of citations in this topic.
Sociologically speaking, Buddhism emerged as a response to the rapid growth of new social milieu. Move from pastoral to agrarian culture, expansion of new cities, urbanization, and new economics with monetary exchange, all these factors played a major role in the way that Buddhism came into being. The new kind of economic growth made life more comfort, busy, and anxious. The new kind of remedy was needed. Subsequently, the Buddha proposed his solution to the predicament of life by renouncing the society to be a mendicant. Leaving the family behind and forsaking any wealth, one should content with minimal needs and find peace inside oneself instead. This is the way the Buddha led his community in two and a half thousand years ago. Buddhism, as we have known until today, is a religion of renunciation.
Nonetheless, if we consider in more details, we find something paradoxical. The majority of disciples of the Buddha came from the upper classes. Buddhism thrived in big cities along trade routes and around the growingly commercial area. The Buddha once told monks “you should be content with what is given.” Subsequently, what is given is more and more abundant until today. Moreover, the Buddha usually complied with the needs of kings or wealthy merchants. As the result, the community of monks settled down and grew rapidly, even in the Buddha’s life time. Monks then came close to the wealth they forsook before.
A question arises. Why they renounce the world at first and come to engage with it again? In this essay, I will try to address this irony by analyzing social situation in the early period of Buddhism and Buddhist attitude towards wealth, as well as by reflecting with some situation in our time.
The early social context of Buddhism
After the turn of the first millennium BCE, the Indo-Aryans, formerly nomadic tribe resorting to stock-rearing, became increasingly settled and agricultural. They began to grow rice as well as barley and to use ploughs. The center of their culture shifted slowly to the Upper Gangetic plains. Around that plains were the setting of the Buddha’s life. The Buddha lived at the end of the period called the Vedic period of Indian history. At that time, most Indians held that knowledge about ultimate matters comes from the Veda—the collective what were heard. This knowledge determined the social reality in turn. According to the Veda, the course of our life was largely determined by our birth—the hierarchic ranking of social purity. There are mainly four castes (varṇa): brahmin (the priests), kṣatriya (the warriors/rulers), vaiśya (the traders/farmers), and śūdra (the servants).
Interestingly enough, the man who was to become the Buddha was not born into this system. He was born near the border between India and Nepal now. His birthplace is “sufficiently far from anywhere mentioned in brahminical texts of that period to make one wonder whether Vedic civilization can have penetrated at all to where he was born and grew up.” The Buddha came from a community called Śākyas from which he modeled the organization of his Saṅgha. The Śākyas seem not to have had a varṇa system but they did have servants. They were isolated to the extent that they were self-governing, and their polity was of a form not envisaged in brahminical theory. As he came from the ruling family, the Buddha came to describe himself as a kṣatriya when he met caste-proud brahmins.
The material conditions of the society in which the Buddha preached was entirely rural, a village-based society, whereas the Buddha spent much of his time in cities. Max Weber wrote in The Religion of India: “Like Jainism, but even clearly, Buddhism presents itself as a product of the time of urban development, of urban kingship and the city nobles.” As the time the Buddha talked to many kings who ruled sizeable territories, that period was not only urbanization, but also the beginning of what we call ‘states.’ The first use of money and the beginnings of organized trade were also saw in the period. Although meager archaeological evidence to support the city states at the Buddha time were found, Gombrich asserted that “the earliest date it seems reasonable to assign to an Indian city (after the prehistoric Indus Valley civilization) is c. 600 BCE: both Kauśambī and Ujjain may be that old.” So, that Buddhism thrived in city areas is plausible.
There is some evidence that the Buddha’s message appealed especially to town-dwellers and the new social classes. On a sample of over 300 monks and nuns from Thera-gāthā and Therī-gāthā, more than two-thirds of them came from large towns, and of these two-thirds 86 percent from just four cities: Sāvatthī, Rājagaha, Kapilavatthu, and Vesālī. Classifying by castes, of 328 monks and nuns 134 were brahmin (about 40 percent), 75 kṣatriya, 98 vaiśya, and 11 śūdra; 10 were outcastes. And nearly half of them came from wealthy or powerful houses.
The canonical text also give us an idea of the social composition of the Buddha’s lay support—gahapati, ‘master of a house’ or ‘householder.’ When ancient texts mention householders, they are referring to heads of families of the top three varṇas. Since brahmins and kṣatriyas formed only a small part of the population, the term must refer mainly to heads of families which brahminism classified as vaiśya.
The early Buddhist text also mentioned holy men: samaṇa-brāhmaṇa. The brāhmaṇa is brahmins in the caste system. The samaṇa (śramaṇa) means something like ‘ascetic.’ When the Buddha left his lay life, there were many kinds of ascetics, such as ‘wanderer’ (parivrājaka/paribbājaka), ‘one who begs his share’ (bhikṣu/bhikkhu), ‘naked ascetic’ (acelaka), ‘matted-hair ascetic’ (jaṭila), the Ājīvika, and the Jain. These wanderers and ascetics seem to have three kinds of activity: (1) the practice of austerities, (2) the cultivation of meditative and contemplative techniques aimed at producing ‘altered states of consciousness,’ (3) the development of various philosophical views.
Why were these religious movements so appealing? Professor A. Ghosh has provided an interesting summary of how urbanization may cause spiritual angst: the movement from village to town or city entails a more complex division of labor and professional specialization; social organization less in terms of kinship groups and more in terms of goal-oriented associations; less stringent control over the individual and greater dependence on impersonal institutions of control (bureaucracy, police, etc.); greater individual freedom and mobility and hence some disintegration of the traditional culture and social order.
I will sum up this section with a view from André Bareau, a notable French Scholar, as follows:
The most recent body of archaeological and philological works concerning the middle basin of the Ganges seems indeed to show that this region, in the course of the fifth century, underwent some very important and progressive changes: the beginning of urbanization; distinct economic development, notably in commerce and in the class of merchants (vaṇij and śreṣṭhin) with their caravans of oxcarts; accentuation of political unification.
Bareau mentioned three significant changes in Indian society at the time of the Buddha, i.e., urbanization, commercial-based economics, and unified political power. These three causes made people encounter new and more complicated situations of life, both pleasure and distress, but the latter cases were more pressing. Thus came some thinkers and practitioners to propose the way out of this predicament. Buddhism was one of these solutions.
A religion of renunciation (for the elites)
The tone of universal dissatisfaction expressed in the concept of dukkha has often been read back into a kind of social angst inducing some people to take up the renouncer’s path. The existing religious institution run by the brahmins at that time seems to have less efficacy to solve people’s psychological problems, so the new religious movements emerged to provide a new worldview, as we have seen in samaṇa movements mentioned above. These new movements mainly focused on renouncing the world. The renouncers abandoned conventional means of livelihood, such as farming or trade, and adopted instead the religious life as a means of livelihood. The Buddha started his career by this way, and Buddhism was seen as a religion of renunciation since then.
With his discovery, the Buddha proposed a new soteriology and the way of practice, from the beginning his teaching attracted mostly the privileged classes. As shown above, most disciples of the Buddha were from brahmin and kṣatriya. Max Weber groups them as the intellectual. In The Sociology of Religion, he writes as follows:
The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos. It is the intellectual who conceives of the ‘world’ as a problem of meaning.
We encounter some interesting point here. As we have analyzed the social situation so far, the majority of people who were impacted significantly with social changes were undoubtedly those from vaiśya, i.e., traders and farmers that outnumbered the top two classes. But those who followed the renouncer traditions, especially Buddhism as shown in the text and as Weber sees it, were mostly from the top two classes—the intellectual.
Weber believes that these privileged classes have ability to discern the truth and pursue the path of renunciation. As he puts it, “[I]t appears rather certain that originally Buddhism, exactly like Jainism, first firmly adhered to the conviction that only one born in the Brahman or Kshatriya castes was qualified for full gnosis.” I think the new social move at that time affected all classes of people there, but the intellectual classes were concerned much about the meaning of life and salvation through renunciation, while for the ordinary people who lived just day to day it meant nothing.
We can understand the point by looking at the nature of Buddhist teaching itself. The Buddha expected those seriously interested in attaining salvation to become monks or nuns. He also regarded meditation as normally impossible for laity. And many of the Buddha’s teachings was only given to the Saṅgha. The way of renunciation is the way the Buddha had done it, and he established the Saṅgha on his life’s model. There is an interesting example concerning the death of the Buddha’s greatest lay patron, the financier Anāthapiṇḍika. When this very wealthy and very devoted follower lay on his deathbed, Sāriputta, one of the Buddha’s chief disciples, came and preached to him a short sermon on detachment. When Anāthapiṇḍika complained that he had never heard such a sermon before, Sāriputta said that such sermons were not preached to the laity because they would not mean anything to them.
From this story we can see that there are two sets of teaching, one for Saṅgha members who renounce their lay lives for pursuing salvation, another for lay followers. However, as Gombrich insists: “Pali literature is quite extensive, but very little of it is what we would call secular.” That is to say, most teachings of the Buddha exclusively address those who renounce the world. Buddhism as preserved in the Pāli canon and by the primary intention is the teaching for renunciation. However, concern for the happiness of all beings is also the foundation of the Saṅgha’s very existence, as the Buddha told his first group of missionary monks.
Go ye now, O Bhikkhus, and wander, for the gain of the many, for the welfare of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, for the gain, and for the welfare of gods and men. Let not two of you go the same way. … There are beings whose mental eyes covered by scarcely any dust, but if the doctrine is not preached to them, they cannot attain salvation. They will understand the doctrine.
Do ‘gain’ and ‘welfare’ mean the same thing as renouncing the world? The consequence of this barely noticeable discrepancy postulates the main question of this essay.
Saṅgha and its growth
At first, the followers of the Buddha were men who had renounced their household and any kind of social ties. The early group of monks began simply as a body of men who were trying to follow the path. Once the members grew to some significant number, disciplines were needed to keep the community in order. Here came the Vinaya, and the Saṅgha—the world’s oldest monastic order. Gombrich aptly describes the Buddhist Saṅgha as the middle way between brahminism and Jainism as follows:
The brahmin is embedded in the society into which he is born: the Buddhist would call it community at the expense of individuality. Though the Jains too developed a Sangha, their religious heroes are first and foremost solitary renunciates, usually referred to as muni, the ‘silent sage’ of the ascetic tradition: individuality at the expense of community. The Buddhist tradition attempts to keep both in balance.
The balance between individual goal and community goal might be derived from the middle way between discomfort and indulgence as the Buddha preached it in the opening word of the First Sermon. And in several cases the Buddha indicated that discomfort is an obstacle on the path of internal progress. One day the King of Kosala congratulated the Buddha about monks who were satisfied, healthy and cheerful. Being healthy implies certain comfortable livings. Other one day a wicked monk proposed to the Buddha that practicing some austerities should be compulsory to all monks, but the Buddha declined. The event caused the first schism in the Saṅgha. This shows that monks in the Buddha’s time had comfort life by comparison with other renouncers, such as Jains, who aim to own nothing at all. Even ascetic Buddhists live in comfort.
While homelessness is a central issue in the Indian tradition of renunciation, Buddhist monks were required to stay in one place in three months of the rainy season. Later, monks more and more settled down in permanent places. As the Vinaya shows us, King Bimbisāra of Magadha presented the Buddha with a place to stay at Rājagaha, a bamboo grove, only a few months after the Enlightenment. This donation was the model for many that followed. As a result, there were monasteries in the four main cities of the region (Rājagaha, Vesālī, Sāvatthī and Kosambī) and on the routes between them.
The Saṅgha began by begging for their food—walking silently from door to door, asking for nothing, receiving in their bowls any scraps or leftovers that the laity may care to give them. However, the Buddha refused to make the alms-round compulsory. From the earliest days, there was no bar to accepting lay invitations to come for a meal. When the rules were elaborated the invitations were supposed to be addressed impersonally to the Saṅgha in general; it is then the responsibility of a monastery officer to decide who should go. This system is still largely in operation in the Saṅgha today. Offerings, including money, in this invitation are also the main earning of monks nowadays. Once laities were allowed to bring food or other things to the monks, the monastic regulation could hardly stop them. Monks are not supposed to refuse things people give.
Although, by the rules, monks are not allowed to accept money as well as buying and selling, but the Vinaya makes it clear that laymen did give cash to ‘legitimizers’ (kappiya-kārakas) and the Buddha allowed monks to what is permissible from that source. It is also acceptable that if a layman spontaneously gives an attendant money to spend on a monk, and the monk has willed nothing wrong. But evidently in practice the line between allowing and not allowing money to be collected or solicited for one by a proxy is a thin one. Today, as far as I know, most Theravāda monks accept money and use it directly. In Thailand, people always offer money to monks in every ceremony that involves monks, they call it ‘requisite’ (paccaya) for the living and put it in envelopes.
Originally, before monastic establishments, there were no lay servants. But they gradually arrived on the scene and were taken almost for granted. We can see the role of these servants in the Vinaya. Gombrich also tells us that “throughout the history of Sri Lanka until very recently the richest monasteries have owned not only vast tracts of real estate but also the labor of its inhabitants.”
The relations between the Saṅgha and their lay supporters were conceived as reciprocal generosity: the Saṅgha gave the Dhamma, the laity gave material support because giving to the Saṅgha brought them merit. The texts often describe the Buddha travelling with 250 or 500 monks, so the Buddha’s chief lay patrons are no wonder extremely wealthy. Although there are some stories indicate that sometimes monks go short or live in famines, monks usually have sufficient necessities and sometimes excessive possessions. The Buddha usually complied with the lay givers, especially the powerful ones. King Bimbisāra once asked for the beginning of the rains retreat to be postponed. Agreeing, the Buddha said, “I prescribe, O Bhikkhus, that you obey kings.” This pressure to accept gifts probably accounts for most of the Saṅgha’s corruptions.
In addition, archaeological findings relating to the earliest stūpa and monasteries represent a later stage of development, when the monks were not typically wandering virtuosi seeking enlightenment but domesticated within society. It is not too far if we infer that correspondence between the Vinaya accounts and material evidence shows that typical monks were not forest dwellers but city settlers.
The Buddhist view on wealth
As we have seen so far, relation between monks and wealth is complicated. In the beginning, it is natural for monks to be wanderers, as good samaṇas should be, and to have merely necessary possession. At this state, monks have an indifferent attitude to wealth. When they gradually increased in number, the Saṅgha was formed, and eventually they settled in one place, less wandering around. When monks have permanent dwellings, they collect possessions more and more. Why does it turn like this? We may understand the situation better by investigating the Buddhist attitude towards wealth.
From a sociological perspective, Uma Chakravarti, after analyzing the significant role of gahapati—the lay supporter, concludes her Social Dimension of Early Buddhism as follows:
The Buddha had a positive attitude to the expanding economy and the contemporary social world despite his ideal of renunciation. His new society, although not perfect and therefore no Utopia, was, however, more attuned to a period of rapid change than the Brahmanical system, which explains its appeal and its success at that time.
And from a more practical level, Buddhists position themselves at the middle point between religious persons who renounced too much (as excessive asceticism of Jain renouncers) and those who renounced too little (brahmins were usually depicted as greedy, wealthy, and corrupt). The followers of the Buddha, in contrast, renounced just enough, according to Buddhist texts, in order to progress along on the path to nirvana without becoming overly attached to specific practices. ‘Just enough’ is a context sensitive word. When monks live as a mendicant, they live just enough. When they live in a big community with abundant resources, they can also live just enough.
In his seminal essay on ethics and wealth in Theravāda Buddhism, Frank E. Reynolds notes that, “Theravāda interpretations of dhamma have, from the very beginning, incorporated a more or less positive valorization of wealth, including material resources, monetary resources, goods, and services.” For example, with regard to inheritance, Buddhists consider a wealthy birth as a clear sign of merit. All Buddhas in the past as accounted in the text were born in wealthy families, king or brahmin.
P. A. Payutto, a prominent Thai scholar monk, writes, “It is not wealth that is praised or blamed (in Buddhist texts), but the way one acquires and uses it.” In A Constitution for Living, he suggests the way to allocate the wealth in two stages: (1) One should be diligent in earning and saving just as bees collect nectar and pollens. (2) When one’s wealth accrues like a termites’ mound, expenditure should be planned thus: one portion to be used for supporting oneself and family, two portions to be used for one’s career, and one portion to be put aside as a guarantee for one’s life and business in times of need. In another place, he explains five ways of using wealth: to support oneself and family, to support friends, to safeguard one’s well-being, to make sacrifices, and to support (good) monks.
In Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, Gregory Schopen notes that the Mūlasarvāstivādin-vinaya assumes that monks had the resources to pay debts and taxes and compensate others for the destruction of property. Some Mūlasarvāstivāda monks, those who were “well known and of great merit,” were even expected to be quite wealthy. Rather than suggesting that such wealth should be renounced or avoided, this Vinaya redacted detailed rules to transmit that wealth to other monks and to shelter it from the state. According to Schopen, some monks turned to be wealthy persons themselves.
In a review of attitudes towards wealth in the Sinhalese chronicle tradition, Steven Kemper argues that the Mahāvaṃsa and Cūlavaṃsa “never scorn wealth, but they condemn wealth as an end in itself.” According to Kemper, when monks are chastised within the chronicles, it is not for their possession of wealth per se, but rather because they are deemed to be undisciplined, corrupt, and immoral. “The desired quality is discipline, not poverty.”
It is clear to conclude that in Buddhist view being wealthy is not wrong but acceptable as far as the wealth is acquired properly and used wisely. Why do monks renounce it in the first place then?
How to deal with the dilemma
Up to this point, the relation between renunciation and wealth appear clearly as paradoxical. At first those who aspire to enlightenment must forsake any wealth to obtain complete liberation, but along the courses of their striving material support is needed, and at the end they live in wealth and come to preach how to acquire and use wealth properly. How can we deal with this dilemma? Is monk a kind of worldly profession?
In Divine Enterprise, Lise McKean sees the situation through Marxist lens. She says, “The ideology of spirituality and renunciation makes it possible for gurus and their religious organizations to not only mask the drive for profits that underlies exchanges with followers but also renew the promise of value which they offer to followers.” I think she goes too far, particularly in the early stage of Buddhism. Nonetheless, in the present circumstance her reason resonates nicely with the situation. Some monasteries in Thailand nowadays look more and more like business corporations in disguise.
Some scholar, such as Rachelle Scott, questions the notion of renunciation itself. She sees the term as vague and culture sensitive. “What constitutes a Buddhist life of renunciation, therefore, is highly dependent upon context.” It is definitely true that when monks renounce their social life, they do not renounce it completely. In Beyond Tradition and Modernity, R. J. Z. Werblowsky asserts that no religion can be totally otherworldly: “If it were, it would not survive its founder, let alone succeed in creating social structures, shaping cultures and producing continuities.” So, some ties with society are still required.
Stanley Tambiah sees the monk-laymen relation as a reciprocal, as he described as follows:
On the one hand, as world renouncer and pursuer of transcendental ends, the monk receives gifts and sustenance from laymen with no obligation to make a return; on the other hand, the monk has an obligation to be a “field of merit” and to reciprocate and give spiritual and humanitarian service to the laymen.
Moreover, in some Buddhist culture, such as Thailand, temporary monkhood is common, and even more importantly, monks who have spent some time in robes acquiring education, reputation, and skills, both spiritual and social, gain advantages from this acquirement when they reenter lay society. This tradition of part-time renouncers plays a significant role in Thai society and economics.
We can also understand the relation as a division of labor. Given such otherworldly principles, Buddhism seems to be a religion of the elite only. As I have shown previously, the early followers of the Buddha were mostly from the top classes, whereas the monastic lifestyle is irrelevant to the vast majority who are unable or unwilling to follow the path to enlightenment. Therefore lay followers play another role to support another group.
Some scholars, mostly anthropologists, see there are several Buddhisms rather than one Buddhism. For example, Melford Spiro sees three Buddhisms in Burma: nibbanic, kammatic and apotropaic. Each type of Buddhism serves different function according to specific needs of the people. In the same line of thought, Greg Bailey and Ian Mabbett think that the need to accommodate a lay following means there would always be several Buddhisms.
If this promotes a picture of plurality, how much more the different emphases within monastic Buddhism where we can most easily distinguish the fund-raising parish priest from the meditator in the monastery and the forest-dwelling ascetic. Plurality becomes more and more reified the longer the institution of Buddhism flourishes and survives.
The final point I will mention here concerning the significance of monk-laymen relation is about preservation of Buddhism. Ilana Silber writes as follows:
If Buddhism were indeed totally otherworldly and exclusively concerned with the ascetic’s personal quest for salvation through withdrawal from the world, the monk would be exclusively engaged in the quest for nirvana; his contact with the layman would be reduced to the bare minimum. However, another major concern is the maintenance of the teachings themselves: Their correct transmission, and the survival of the monastic community that is the prerequisite for it, demand a certain degree of worldly involvement and interaction with the laity.
This means the worldly involvement turns to be the essential cause of the existence of the Saṅgha and of Buddhism as a whole.
Conclusion, renounce or rejoin?
From the accounts elaborated so far, I see three of what can be called “theories of renunciation and wealth relation.”
- Exploitation Theory—renunciation is a kind of exploitation of some religious persons to gain wealth. This theory is clearly a Marxist one. Lise McKean mentioned above is one in this camp.
- Reciprocal/Division-of-Labor Theory—renouncers and lay supporters play complementary roles to each other. Stanley Tambiah is one example in this camp.
- Many Religions Theory—renouncers and lay followers have different goals, so they hold different Buddhisms. Melford Spiro and some anthropologists who distinguish between Great and Little traditions are among this camp.
Which side do I take? It does not the matter of which theory is better, because there are some truths according to them. These theories can describe and explain the situation in various angles. However, I will reflect on the problem from my own view—a monk’s perspective.
If we ask the basic question: “What Buddhism is all about?” I think the only relevant answer is ‘liberation.’ Does ‘liberation’ amount to ‘renunciation’? I think they are not the same. Renunciation can be a way leading to liberation, but liberation is a state of mind detaching from anything, not a state of body devoid of material comfort. By this account, liberation is not about freeing from wealth, but freeing from the significance wealth makes to us.
Renunciation is the traditional way to gain liberation, and it is culture-bound. It is not relevant, and not impossible, now in Thailand for one who needs liberation to discard any responsibility and go to live in the forest. The main reason is that we now have no such a forest at all. Woods and land now are estates of high economic value. Forest is equal to wealth in current context, so to speak.
Moreover, to be a monk nowadays is more or less to be a member of a large organization which has to be concerned mainly with politico-economic condition for its survival. Saṅgha today is equal to a corporation, so to speak. The majority of monks today come from economic urge, not spiritual one. So, I can say, now renunciation is somewhat useless for liberation. However, liberation is still possible in present time. The key is neither to renounce the world nor to rejoin it. The heart of liberation, as I understand it, is about practice. As long as liberation is the main concern and practices are performed, any situation is fine, and Buddhism is there.
Notes